modeling complexity, design research, strategy, prototyping, storytelling, visual design
Ribeiro Toolkit
A toolkit for mapping, diagramming and visualizing alternative and counter narratives
Project executed during Politics of Design seminar at IIT Institute of Design
This crowd-sourced deck of cards is a work in progress. It aims to support designers, architects, artists, cartographers, geographers, researchers, activists, and others, to explore and develop ways of constructing diagrams to tell inconvenient stories that upset and resist the status quo. This is for everyone who is working against representations of a dominant idea that hides stories and realities. Through these visualizations, people can build narratives that illuminates a pathway to transcend the broken dominant politics and get to the urgent work at hand.
New perspectives and visual strategies are required not only to expand designers’ perceptions about the representation at play, but also to provide alternative directions for diagramming more thoughtfully.
Ribeiro provides four collections of possibilities that together inform different ways of designing an alternative or counter-narrative visualization.
Challenge
Explore the question of how do designers intervene in exploitation and oppression? How might we create an experience, artifact, tool, framework, and/or service that helps other designers to create anti-oppressive designs? The approach to be developed could function at the project, institutional, and/or societal level.
“Maps, diagrams and visualizations are both artifacts and processes. They are tools that tells a story, and create ways of bringing people and things together in the telling of that story. Rather than perform a G’d trick, diagrams should be speaking from a conscious position.”
Application
This toolkit was envisioned to be applied in diverse settings, such as academic environment, non-profits, government and private organizations. Within these contexts, people might engage with it in different ways, such as workshops, delivering a project for clients, academic storytelling or for personal use.
Acknowledgement
This project would not have been possible without the stimulating conversations I had with:
IIT Institute of Design faculty
Laura Forlano
Sari Gluckin
Tomoko Ichikawa
Jessica Jacobs
Chris Rudd
Ruth Schmidt
Denis Weil
IIT Institute of Design colleagues
Rodrigo Dyer
Ananya Garg
Goeun Lee
Pinakee Naik
Prachi Saxena
Tanvi Ranka
Adithya Ravi
Cristina Tarriba
IIT College of Architecture colleague
Giovana Geluda